KC-area kid’s classmates had lunch debt. He raised cash to clear it - and then some | Opinion
What do you do, at age 11, after raising more than enough money to wipe out your school’s lunch debt?
If you’re Daken Kramer, who just graduated from Thomas Ultican Elementary School in Blue Springs, Missouri, you encourage other kids to do the same, but also raise questions about why only eight states provide universal free lunch. Missouri is not among them, and neither is Kansas.
“Parents and kids shouldn’t have to worry about having school lunch debt,” Daken told me. “School lunch debt is just ridiculous.” Amen, young sir.
Keeping school kids from going hungry should not be up to other school kids, but Daken saw the need and did something about it, which is more than Missouri officialdom can say.
I first wrote about this issue in 2017, after the Harrisonville School District made news for making kids whose parents couldn’t pay go to the end of the school lunch line. Then these junior scofflaws, who should have known better than to have been born into families that couldn’t always afford lunch, were fed a sunflower seed butter and jelly or cheese sandwich. In some school districts, kids whose parents owe lunch debt are still being served stigma on white bread.
Blue Springs does not, I’m glad to say, shame kids whose parents don’t have the money for a meal. But the district’s debt is over $200,000, and Missouri school lunch debt amounted to $43 million earlier this year. The national public school meal debt is $262 million a year, despite all of those students who are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals.
Daken became part of the solution this spring, after he started thinking about his fifth grade graduation. He’d had some challenges in school and yet was able to overcome them, thanks to a couple of his teachers in particular, and “I wanted to do something kind to say thank you. My teacher Mrs. Haley is really, really nice and a really good teacher. Mrs. Haley has proved she can do it all.”
It was Kristi Haley, he said, who “talked me into joining a group called I AM Noticed, which gets kids noticing and acknowledging others for doing the right thing, even in simple ways. For example, “if somebody throws something in the trash and misses, but the person after him picks it up and throws it away, even though it wasn’t his.”
“I like being in this group,” Daken said, “because I like noticing people who don’t often get noticed.” What a great way to go through life.
When Daken and his mom, Vanessa Kramer, who runs an in-home day care center, were brainstorming what he might do to say “thank you,” she mentioned that when she’d been in school in Independence, “I had to have peanut butter and jelly if my mom owed lunch debt. I know from experience how hard that is. I was eating peanut butter and jelly in high school, and that’s not enough food.”
After his mom explained the food insecurity that 1 in 5 kids in America experiences, Daken was as shocked as we all should be: “I said, ‘We have to do this.’” So he started knocking on doors in his neighborhood, and made a fundraising Facebook video that caught the attention of several local TV news reporters. As a result, he ended up raising $7,400. After paying off his school’s $3,200 in debt, he gave the rest to pay down Blue Springs High School’s debt, and then the Arby’s Foundation paid off the rest.
Daken’s message to other kids is this: “If you’re someone like me who wants to do this, what’s holding them back? They can definitely do it.”
But he also said several times that adults should get involved, too, and sure they should.
Missouri Republican, Democrat proposed free school meals
Missouri state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, has introduced a bill on providing universal free school meals, as has state Sen. Angela Mosley, a Democrat from St. Louis County. Neither piece of legislation went anywhere, unfortunately.
“They all see that there’s a need,” Seitz told me, “but to get them focused on that need” is harder. “What I ran into is, ‘How do we pay for it?’ But who’s getting squeezed? It’s the lower middle class, just struggling to survive.”
Kathy Saile, the director of No Kid Hungry in California, the first state to offer universal free school meals, says that yes, the biggest increase in those participating and also actually eating those meals have been those students whose parents earn just a little more than the federal eligibility threshold of $55,000 for a family of four for reduced-price meals, and $39,000 for free meals.
“That’s where a lot of the school lunch debt occurs,” she said. Kids in more affluent districts whose families don’t fit that profile also miss out. And “if we expect good educational outcomes, they need to eat.”
Seitz will try again next session, he said, and hopes that a new speaker, floor leader and budget chair “may be more positive on it. That’s something I’d like to see happen in the state of Missouri, and something we can afford.”
If we cared as much about kids as we claim to, would that even be a question?
Maybe next year, in all seriousness, Seitz should bring Daken Kramer to Jeff City to help him convince some of his fellow lawmakers.
Mrs. Haley, Daken’s fifth grade teacher, has inspired him to want to become a teacher, too. Because, as his mom says, “he wants to be able to help kids like him who might struggle a little bit with focusing and typical classroom learning styles. He said, ‘I want to make learning fun for them so they don’t give up on themselves. Mrs. Haley always respected us and treated us like we matter, and that’s the kind of teacher I want to be.’”
Thank you, Mrs. Haley, thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Kramer, and thank you, Daken, for noticing both what’s going right and what is not. Missouri lawmakers, please notice all that they have, too, and give them the support they deserve.
This story was originally published June 19, 2024 at 7:45 AM.
